For our reader series of songs inspired by presidential candidates, Mark gets ambitious:

In your long list of endeavors this election cycle, I offer an album (in its entirety) that speaks to the different players in the election cycle of 2015-2016: Chris Rea’s Road to Hell, released in 1989. (The Geffen CD issue, which is what I’ve got, included “Let’s Dance.”)

1. “The Road to Hell (Part 1)” - This song is for the Vichy Republicans:

I said ‘mama I come to the valley of the rich
Myself to sell’
She said ‘son this is the road to hell’

2. “The Road to Hell (Part 2)” - This song is for the Independents:

Oh look out world, take a good look
What comes down here
You must learn this lesson fast and learn it well
This ain’t no upwardly mobile freeway
Oh no, this is the road
Said this is the road
This is the road to hell

3. “You Must Be Evil” - This song is for every breathing Democrat
regarding Trump:

You’re giving out some bad ideas here
I can’t believe that you don't realize
You must be evil

4. “Texas” - This song is for Ted Cruz (the reference to killing and Texas doesn't help):

Well my wife returns from taking
My little girl to school
She’s got beads of perspiration
As she tries to keep her cool
She says that mess it don't get no better
There’s gonna come a day
Someone's gonna get killed out there
And I turn to her and say
Texas

5. “Looking for a Rainbow” - This song is for the Trump believers:

Well we come down to the valley
Yea we're looking for the honey
I see a rainbow
I say that's the land of milk and honey

6. “Your Warm and Tender Love” - This song is for the il/legal immigrants:

I was a stranger to the land and life around
In constant danger, being hurt by what I found
And of hurting what I treasured most
Foolish eagle never dove
Till I fell upon your warm and tender love
In the shadows of your warm and tender love

7. “Daytona” - This song is for the hesitant Hillary voters:

Now she ain't easy so you take good care
Or she will scream down on your lust
She can please you like no other
Or she can leave you eating dust

8. “That's What They Always Say” - This song is for the Libertarians:

I’m getting out, I'm holding on
I'm hanging in, the time is wrong
And every morning brings another reason
A piece of cake, no lion share
Just one more dice and you'll be there
That golden bridge is just around the bend

9. “Let's Dance” - This song is for the apolitical (do any still exist?):

Caught in a world full of tears
So many bad times and fears
So while there's a chance and you're near
Let's dance

10. “I Just Wanna Be with You” - This song is for Bernie Sanders fans:

I just want to be with you
No matter what they say
Just want to be with you
Every night and every day
Cold nights, dark days
I want to be with you

11. “Tell Me There’s a Heaven” - This song is for the anti-Trump
Republican establishment:

So which song did Elaine and the P&PD team pick among the scores of reader submissions? Carly Simon’s ode to narcissism:

The refrain is very meta:

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain
I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you? Don’t you?

Thanks to reader David Neufeld for the winning pick. The runners-up were DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” (a primary-themed pick from reader Raymond Williams) and the old American spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands” (an ominous pick from Charles Patterson). Regarding the latter, here’s a rendition more in line with Trump’s WrestleMania past:

Great band, great song, and sung by a woman to bring cross-over appeal. And really, what else can top “We Are the Champions” for self-assurance and braggadocio? Even better, the swearing adds a dash of New York values …

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

All this week, Elaine—who writes our Politics & Policy Daily newsletter—has been soliciting reader responses to the question, “What song should Donald Trump come out to when he walks on stage Thursday night at the Republican National Convention?” Scores of you have written in, and Elaine will be announcing the top picks tomorrow, but right now, before The Donald struts out (or maybe flies out?) to the podium tonight, here’s an over-the-top entry from Susie that I couldn’t resist posting as a note, namely to publish the words “carnelian-red dripping maw”:

Trump’s walk-out melody at the RNC should be “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” Costume and staging matter, too. His entrance will be preceded by a veritable battalion of marching, naked-but-draped, blonde bombshells (literally). His profligately gilt-edged children—clearly branded TRUMP on their foreheads, and with all their strings and the master puppeteer visible by over-head projection—will also join the procession, dropping tiny-but-very-white redneck effigies along his walkway (to mark his path of retreat).

Trump enters with a dark and crookedly flowing cape sporting stripes pulsing in neon yellow. The papier mâché wall following him is decorated in pesos-stuffed piñatas and bordered in the blood of migrants. The music will abruptly stop on a loud and jarring note immediately upon him reaching the podium and just after the crowd-circulated collection plates have been gathered into his grasping hands. Photo op: His orange face will outshine his yellow pulsing stripes, and the green of Republican dollars falling from his blistered hands into the black hole of his drooling, carnelian-red dripping maw will sparkle in the light of a purple Lucifer’s welcoming embrace.

I was tooling around in the car today and Lucinda Williams’s cover of AC/DC's “It’s A Long Way To The Top” came up. Her tone screamed out to the trip that Hillary Clinton is on. And the content, along with the Mavis Staples-like voice helping out in the background, had me thinking about Elizabeth Warren, her line of work, and her possible outspoken support for quite possibly the first woman POTUS. I didn’t think Warren was going to do that until next week, but she had probably announced very shortly before the tune came up for me.

It’s appropriate on so many levels. The two men have a lot in common in generation and origin, but more importantly, in viewpoints on social justice, equality, individual liberty, and peace. Both are complex, but they are brave in their convictions, and this song addresses hope for the restoration of a functional democracy.

Update from a reader with an alternative pick:

Leonard Cohen is great, but for my money you’d be hard pressed to find a song more explicitly socialist in sentiment than Joseph Arthur's “Travel as Equals.” (There’s a studio version too, but this live version from the Letterman show is somehow far superior.) The message aimed straight at the 1%, and the emotion in Arthur’s vocals seem to me a perfect summation of the core of Bernie’s appeal.

(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)

At a rally today in Illinois, presidential long shot John Kasich compared his life to that of Bilbo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, paraphrasing Gandalf to say that things in life don’t happen by accident. But if the Ohio governor were like Baggins—nice and inoffensive, nobody's really sure why he’s still around or what role he’s playing—then which characters from the book would most fit the other presidential candidates?

To her opponents, Hillary Clinton seems like Beorn, taking on whatever form is most convenient for the moment. Bernie Sanders, his supporters might say, is like Bard the Bowman as he goes after the elite wealth-hoarder Smaug. Marco Rubio is Fíli, the young, promising future leader who is unceremoniously killed. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is Thorin, a bombastic, riches-obsessed guy who is somehow leading everyone. Ted Cruz, like Gollum, covets his (class) ring. And Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal are the trolls who were knocked off early.

Long after the next president is sworn in, Kasich will probably still be around, living to 130 years old or so before one day crossing the sea with the elves.

(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)

A few weeks ago, a reader insisted, “It’s only fitting that each candidate gets a theme song that’s truly representative.” So far we’ve gotten entries for Trump, Sanders, and Cruz. Here’s one for Clinton—Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” which a pair of Clinton supporters mashed up with footage of her from several decades:

The reader adds, “If this video is truly independent, Team HRC needs to find these folks and hire them.” Update: The original video was removed from YouTube, so I replaced with a new copy, but if that gets removed too, here is the original Bikini Kill music video.

For our new series of songs themed on presidential candidates, readers have already submitted ones for Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz. Today a reader sends “Donald Trump’s theme song,” which should be taken tongue in cheek:

Speak English or Die is the debut studio album by the crossover thrash band Stormtroopers of Death (S.O.D.), released in December 1985. The albumhas sold over 1 million copies worldwide. The album had some controversy due to the politically incorrect lyrics. Bassist Dan Lilker stated, “The lyrics were never intended to be serious, just to piss people off.”

We weren’t trying to do anything when we made that record. We wrote a bunch of fucking ridiculous songs that made us laugh. The whole twenty-two minutes, or whatever it is, is just a big inside joke. And it worked; it fucking worked. And people… Well, not everybody, ‘cause some people hated it. Some people thought we were racist, and those people are stupid. But a lot of people got the joke all over the planet and laughed along with us, and it was fucking awesome.

“Joan of Arc” by Arcade Fire is way too perfect as a theme song for Ted Cruz coming out of the Iowa caucuses. There are quite a few songs about Joan out there—two operas, a musical, various pop songs from Leonard Cohen to Madonna—but this one is about how much hatred she inspired in others even though she was proven to be right in the end.

You had a vision they couldn’t see so
They put you down
But everything that you said would happen
It came around
And they’re the ones that put you down
'Cause they got no heart
But I'm the one that will follow you
You’re my Joan of Arc

I suspect Cruz isn’t quite ready to be burned at the stake for his beliefs, but his followers do seem to believe he has a direct line to G-d.

Now that the presidential race is in full swing, I think it’s only fitting that each candidate gets a theme song that’s truly representative. This 1974 gem from 10cc is the perfect fit for Bernie. Delightfully bouncy (I love that time change in the middle), and the lyrics belie the cheery music:

Did your money make you better?
Are you waiting for the hour
When you can screw me?
‘Cos you’re big enough

To do the Wall Street Shuffle
Let your money hustle
Bet you’d sell your mother
You can buy another

Feel the Bern indeed!

What a great idea from our reader, picking a song that represents each candidate; what’s yours? Drop me an email with a brief explanation and I’ll post the best ones. There are/were a ton of GOP candidates (Jim Gilmore? “Who Are You?”), so this could turn into a great long series.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.